People on the internet today love to get offended and very often people get offended by someone calling something “normal”. Especially if this “normal” is somehow different from them. But often people simple misunderstand the words normal and average and use them as synonyms, which they aren’t. There is a very big difference between normal and average and I’ll try to make it clear here. Understanding that difference is the key to not get offended so easily by these words.

So, this is the normal (Gaussian) distribution or the so-called bell curve:

The line in the middle, in the green area, represents the average. It’s the mean score – the sum of all scores divided by the number of scores. So you can have a group of things with an average of x, although none of the things actually is x. For example when we take the ages of a group of 10 friends: 21 21 22 23 23 25 25 25 26 29. The average age of this group of friends is 24, although none of them is actually 24. But that’s not their “normal” age. Everything in the 95,4%-range is considered normal, in the case of our group of friends an age between 19 and 29 would be “normal”. Many researchers use the more strict 99,7%-range when testing their hypothesis. So normal are 95,4% of all things, while the average is the mean of all things.

My point is – often people say normal, but mean average. Average doesn’t mean good, it just means average, the arithmetic mean. Normal is almost everything. Normal doesn’t mean good, it just means that something is not extraordinary different than other things.

This article describes the problem really good and simple in the context of child development.

Also hobo mama had a very good post on that topic again in the context of child development.

So my loved ones – I wish you uniqueness and less “normality” and “averageness”.

I want to share with you this video that really made me think differently about life, at least for some moments. The video essentially states, that organic life is simply a more efficient way of absorbing and releasing energy. And since absorbing and releasing energy is essential to keeping the universe in order, that’s what life does. That’s all. It just keeps the universe together by absorbing and releasing energy somehow better than inorganic stuff.

So if that does not impress you, I don’t blame you. I find it weirdly calming. I see it like that – if you have a bad day and everything sucks for some reason, you can think to yourself – well hey, I’m absorbing and releasing energy, keeping the universe together, that’s basically all I was supposed to do, everything else is just made up ephemeral shit that doesn’t really matter, so I’ll just keep calm, absorb and release energy and do my deed to the universe. It’s that a sweet deal? For me it is and helps me go more easily through life. So I’ll just leave you here with this thought – you can enjoy it or not, doesn’t really matter – you still absorb and release energy🙂

PS. yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, but again – this is my little peace of the internet and I’ll be posting just as I feel like it. Here I want to thank Chase again for the great comments, that motivated me to post again🙂

Have you ever said something like that, like anything with “kill myself”? I guess you have because I’ve heard and said it a lot. And I’ve never thought deeper about it, for me it’s just like any other expression out there, I would never think that saying something like that can really make someone think about actually someone killing himself. But yet again – I never tried to kill myself or have a close one killing himself. In this very interesting post Mollie shares her experiences with such phrases reminding her of how her father killed himself and how hard it is, that it’s totally socially acceptable that expressions with “killing oneself” are simply part of our everyday life.

I guess raising awareness about it is the first step to changing it. Not so long ago sexist and racist expressions were just as OK as the suicide-phrases now, because nobody thought that someone is getting hurt by them… So just think about it – every time you say something about “killing yourself” people could get flashbacks and be sadly reminded of a deep trauma they carry.

You could get a bit creative there, like try to find the next hot phrase out there “this is so boring, I could start doing yoga” … ?

Like slideworld said in a comment here, if you don’t want to worry about something don’t share it at all. For me that sounds just like if you don’t want to be betrayed, just don’t trust anyone or if you don’t want to have your heart broken, don’t give it to anyone. And all of that is perfectly logical, but logical doesn’t always mean practical or desirable. What we all really desire is not to live in full security by living trusting only ourselves, but to have someone else, who we really trust. Just like you’ll never look back and think “man, good for me that I’ve never ever trusted anyone and I haven’t have my heart broken by now”, but more likely you’ll think “man, I’ve been heartbroken a couple of times and that really sucked, but now I’m happy with my beloved one”.

That’s all not really new, but what is changing is the environment. It’s easier to share something online and once something is out, you can never get it back, so you should be even more careful online. It’s like on the one hand, the internet is giving us the opportunity to communicate more, regardless of the place and time where we are and is making e.g. long-distance relationships easier, but on the other hand the same thing that’s making all this possible, is bringing more and more suspect and doubt in our relationships… It’s like alcohol – it doesn’t really taste good, you first have to get used to it, for some period it makes you feel really good, makes it easier for you to build relationships and have fun, but if you take too much of it, it could make everything go wrong, so the most important thing about alcohol/ internet is to use it with caution😉

The NSA-affair got everyone thinking about online privacy a bit more. But in my opinion the NSA is not the biggest threat for privacy on the net, it’s much more simply the people theirselves. I really don’t feel insecure because the NSA could be spying on my messages or something, I feel much more insecure about the person I am talking to not keeping our conversation, photos etc. to theirselves. While I’ve never heard anything from the NSA by now, I’ve often seen private messages being pasted in other conversation or even on facebook-walls, pictures who were shared in a private dropbox-folder being shared on facebook-walls unasked, pictures of me I’ve never seen before being shared on my wall or somewhere else etc. This may have become normal to some extend, but it definitely makes the internet a not so private space. Everyone should be aware of the many possibilities to share information, who was supposed to be private, to everyone else out there. Even snapchat wouldn’t really help, you can mostly make a snapshot of your photo with one touch. That makes the rising of sexting even more puzzling to me, but I guess that young people today simply need to feel like they can trust someone enough … to send him a naked picture of theirselves and that he’ll keep it to himself. But can they? I don’t think so…

Do you know how sometimes you are fake-smiling and at some point you start feeling happier, like for real and not fake-happy, although you started with a fake smile? Well, I don’t… But it’s really how it’s supposed to work, there are enough studies showing that the outside can and does affects the inside greatly! And even if it hasn’t really worked for me with a fake smile, it surely works on a cognitive basis, like when you live in a city everyone says it’s the best – yeah, that starts to feel good in a while🙂 I imagine that this is the only reasonable reason to live in New York and I would gladly buy it …

This TED-talk is about this effect. E.g. it says that people, who were taking powerful poses (standing straight, bright arms etc.) before going to a job interview did a lot better than people who were taking powerless poses (head down, touching the neck etc.). But the bigger deal there for me is, that this was due to them showing more presence and personality. Not a fake personality or an ideal personality, there were showing their own real personality more! So, it’s not like you show a fake image of you when e.g. you fake power before a job interview, but you’re just hiding your real personality more when you don’t…

Southpark often has some good points, but one of their best ones was the one with the “racist flag”. Do you know the one, where they want to change the town flag in this one:

Racist Flag

and everyone is really horrified by it, because the black guy is being hang, but the boys can’t get why everyone is so shocked by the flag, because it doesn’t even come to their minds, that the colour of the figures even matter. Well isn’t this how it should be – there are four white guys and one black guy, but all you see are just five guys? And it doesn’t come to mind to treat the black one differently, because skin colour is just as meaningless to you as eye- or hearcolour. Is this even possible?

I really don’t think that I’ll live long enough to see a society like that. Today even hear colour is still sometimes the object of prejudices. A movie about slavery has just won the oscar – so race is still very very noticeable. Maybe we’ll never overcome it, but in many many years, we all will be so mixed up, that all the races will become one “unirace” with features from all races. Then it wouldn’t be that easy to differentiate races… Although, today we see discrimination not only based on race, but also on other stupid things, that you really don’t see at first sight. E.g. in Germany there’s still a big gap between West- and Ost-Germany, although people look pretty much the same in both… So maybe there will always be some kind of discrimination, but only based on different things than race? Is this the best we can reach? What do you think?

It’s pretty sad that today I really can’t dream the dream of Martin Luther King and imagine a world where people aren’t being judged by their colour, OK, maybe they’re not being judged by their colour, but their colour still matters a lot and brings up lots of prejudice and maybe is partly responsible for the enormous gap between black and white prisoners… We need prejudice to simplify the complex world around us, but really, do we need so much? Come on, we can drop some out, let’s start with the big ones, because they really matter! Or if you want start with the little ones, any kind of reducing prejudices is still a step forward🙂

It’s amazing how little simple things can be so brilliant. For example an apple slicer, it’s genius! It increases the apple intake by 50% according to my personal experience🙂

You may think – well, this is like really old, it’s been out there forever, why talk about it now? Well, I just discovered it two weeks ago. I was visiting friends, saw it in action and was like totally amazed😮 It’s like – you get perfectly shaped apple slices with only one hand grip, that’s amazing! It’s also good for your apple intake, because you can easily share an apple with other people, so the apple wouldn’t get wasted for sure. It’s these little genius things that give me hope in humanity.

What makes me doubt in humanity is, that this little piece of genius only costs 1€ in every 1€-shop. Why do we need 1€-shops anywhere? So that people would buy useless things only because they only costs 1€? Otherwise, a genius thing like an apple slicer could be useless for someone else…

Sometimes your eyes meet the eyes of someone else and you just know – this is it, THE LOVE! You can’t take your eyes off and if you’re lucky, it’ll last for a long time. This is the kind of love I believe to have with my husband.

What I find most fascinating about this love is, that It’s a very simple kind of love. In this post it’s suggested that there are three kinds of love: “I love you because”, “I love you if” and “I love you in spite of”. So I thought about our love and it’s none of these three, it’s just a simple “I love you”. In case of doubt it’s a “I don’t know why, but I know that I love you. I don’t need a reason to love you, I just need to look into your eyes and I know that I love you”. This is how love at first sight works for me, from the first day on. Read the rest of this entry »